Just reflecting on how essential Wikipedia is for teachers and students in today’s world.

The Catholic church elected a new Pope yesterday. Wikipedia already has an extensive article about the new pope. How long will it take for print publications to catch up? And why would you bother with consulting a print publication when the information is so easily accessible online?

I am going on leave later this month, and I have decided to take along all my holiday reading on my shiny new iPad. I bought a couple of recent releases I have been meaning to read from Amazon Kindle and through the iTunes store at prices which were quite reasonable – about 1/2 – 2/3 what I would pay for a new hardback. Whether this will turn out to be a bargain when someone else in the family wants to read those books remains to be seen.

There are about a dozen other books I wanted to read on my holiday (I plan to do a lot of reading), some for sheer pleasure and a couple to prepare for an event I will be attending soon after I return to work. Some of these books I already own in p-book format, some are a bit esoteric, and some others are ‘classics’. Unfortunately none of the books on my list was in the iTunes or Kindle catalogue. So I went searching. Several of the titles were easy to find on Project Gutenberg. I downloaded them as text, saved then as PDF and slid them into the iBook reader. One book that I already owned, which I had purchased for $40, was available in a private e-book store to download for $125! Another was downloadable from a similar store for $3.99, and a third was $0.99. I bought the one that was $0.99, and all the other books on my list (even the $125 one) I managed to find eventually and download for free from a variety of sources.

I am all set for my holiday reading now. And I guess the message of this is that just about everything you want is available on the internet, and if you know where and how to search you can probably find it for free.